


Philosophy, Politics and Ending Up Where We Were Always Headed

by Zabbers



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: M/M, Post-Finale, every story I write about Malcolm and Jamie is about Jamie coming back for Malcolm, flashfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-22
Updated: 2018-04-22
Packaged: 2019-04-26 13:21:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14402994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: Jamie finds an abject Malcolm. Malcolm doesn't chase him away. They make out in a toilet stall.





	Philosophy, Politics and Ending Up Where We Were Always Headed

Comes the day Malcolm finds himself the guest speaker at a PPE lecture. He _has_ written a memoir--there are bills to pay, demons to exorcise, power, if he’s honest with himself, to want back. He’s half sure he’s here to serve as a cautionary tale: don’t overstep your bounds, if you’re one of the ones born to them. If you’re not, don’t let some cocky ruthless nobody with a mouth like a bumfuck blitzkrieg think he can have any influence over the behaviour of your party, our country, or the general sorry direction of the human race. Look at him. Recognise him for what he is. Memorise the pattern so you can nip it in the bud in future. 

It’s his first quasi-public appearance, unpublicised and unpublished. He has to monetise his failings, but he’ll be caught alone in the commons with the underdeveloped sons of Britain before he’ll go so far as to let his own kind gangbang him for the entertainment of the masses. So he doesn’t expect to see any faces he knows, save for the eerily familiar repeats of the inbred elite. 

Except he does.

Except he’s almost letting himself have fun, building momentum on some topic or another for the sheer joy of it, not really caring what he’s on about, almost forgetting himself and the shit of the last six years, spearing his audience with indiscriminate accipitrine eye contact when he sees him in the audience and falters. 

He stumbles over his words like he never does, and it’s like he’s falling over an actual hole, a gap in the pavement the size of the abyss in his head. The one he’s been systematically pissing in because he’s Malcolm Tucker, he’s just full of bright ideas.

Somehow, he manages to complete the lecture, though afterwards he can’t remember a thread of it. Then the students are packing up, filing out, and he’s wondering if the ones who actually have _questions_ for him are encountering a face that looks as much like it’s had an industrial chemical lovingly applied to it as he feels, subjectively, on the inside. 

Then they all clear off--or maybe they’re all still there, just a lot of room meat--and there, amused expression not bothering to mask the much more complicated one in his eyes, there is Jamie.

 

He doesn’t really know how they get from the lecture hall to the toilets and there are probably students coming and going outside the stall door, but at least they’re not minors, so it is not as catastrophically bad as it could be that Malcolm is living out the kind of blackmail fodder he would once have gladly catalogued and carefully filed away in the vertical cabinet to trot out on red letter days.

Though in the grand scheme of things, a standing fuck in a toilet stall is really only one step removed from lights-off heterosexual congress under covers in the marital home, potbellied husband dutifully failing to get farty wifey off, as far as dirt goes. 

He or Jamie, one of them at least, must have said something at some point, or should, but now their mouths are busy. Jamie has Malcolm against the door, kissing like the demon turned seminary boy turned dervish turned free man he is, and Malcolm would like to fucking look at him for a minute, but he’s so close he’s hopelessly out of focus, an atavistic force, like a sandstorm. 

Sandstorms scrape you raw, but there’s nothing scratchy about Jamie, which some part of Malcolm is able to stand back and observe means that he’s shaved carefully, and recently, and he seems to have combed his hair too. Malcolm’s got fistfuls of it between his fingers, tilting Jamie’s head, somewhere between pulling him closer and dragging him away. 

It takes everything he has in him not to make a sound when Jamie unbuckles his belt and reaches into his trousers, but Jamie seems to have no fear, because the sound _he_ makes contains all the enthusiasm of a bulimic in a Bourneville shipping centre. 

There’s a sudden astonished stillness beyond the door. A sink runs on through the silence, stops. 

Malcolm holds his breath, but the wee psychopath isn’t pausing, even as Malcolm squirms, wild inside. 

_Jamie_ , he mouths, a warning and a plea. 

Jamie smirks, but he relents, resting his hand casually on Malcolm’s hip as though to stop him doing a runner when the coast is clear; it probably looks like he might. The outside door opens and closes, and there is the sense, impossible to confirm, that the inadvertent fucking eavesdroppers have left. 

Jamie barely looks at him before trying to start in again. Malcolm has the sudden insight, like ground glass in a Mars bar, that Jamie, instead of fearless, is terrified to stop. Because if they stop they’ll have to talk. Because if they stop, all the words will come out--the ones that have been stuffed down as though with a gag order for so long they must be hard and killing as stones by now--and the distance will come between them again. They’ll put it there. 

_No_ , Malcolm thinks. _Fuck it, no, not this time._

He kisses Jamie, deeply, to staunch the words, abashed at the tenderness with which the gesture fills the space between them. He turns around, as if to go, but this time, it is to stay.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by byronicjamie.


End file.
